by Andrés Barba
One afternoon, she and her father went fishing, just the two of them. They bought a couple of touristy fishing poles and sat out at the marina. Marina caught a tiny fish, silver and twitching. She felt the bite like a muscle tightening and reeled in her line until a tiny bream appeared, the size of a saucer. It thrashed its little tail and opened and closed its mouth with mesmerizing anxiety. In order to pull it from the water and help her free it from the hook, her father wrapped his arms around her, and she felt his weight. She got so panicky, and her father took so long, that by the time they tossed it back into the water, it was already dead. It just floated there, one tiny, vertical eye staring up at the sky. They pretended not to see it, but the current kept dragging it back to them, over and over again. Marina thought, for the first time, I’m going to tell him right now, I’ll tell him I know everything. She was tormented by the urge, an urge that had never existed until that moment, as though she needed desperately to become an adult, or an accomplice, in the eyes of her father, and the mere prospect of doing it made her so nervous that she was paralyzed and silent for several minutes.
“I remember when I was nineteen, just before I moved to Madrid, I had a love affair right here in this town,” her father said.
She turned to face him. He had the same far-off look he’d been getting when he told a story those days. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard him talk about an old lover. In her family, both her father and mother would occasionally bring up former boyfriends and girlfriends with an absentminded lack of restraint, as though it didn’t matter in the slightest, as though it were amusing to paint a vaguely humiliating portrait of them.
“She was a small-town girl, really pretty, a little shy. What was her name . . . ?”
Her father stared silently at the little floating fish for a few seconds, as though perhaps it might respond, from the dead.
“For some reason, I told her I wanted to marry her. Then when I got back to Santander, a few days before I was going to Madrid, the whole thing suddenly seemed absurd. I was too ashamed to call her and tell her I didn’t love her, just like that. So I wrote a letter, telling her I had a disease, a terrible skin condition, something really unpleasant, and that I was going to die soon, that there was nothing that could be done.”
He fell silent again, smiling, as though he were about to burst out laughing.
“What was her name . . . ?” he asked the fish once more.
“So what happened?”
“I went to Madrid. When I’d been there two weeks, your grandmother called. She told me that a girl had turned up at the house, in Santander, asking for me. And that she’d said she didn’t care about the disease, it didn’t matter to her . . . What do you think of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Isn’t it sweet?”
“Yeah.”
“I suddenly pictured her leaving home, this shy girl . . . I don’t know, getting on a bus, going all the way to Santander, showing up and introducing herself to my mother . . .”
They bought some nice white wine, and seafood to have with it, and went back to the house. At dinner they hardly spoke, and they drank an entire bottle of wine before they’d started eating, and another as they ate. Her mother put on some music. Her father seemed to be in high spirits after the story of the girl who’d fallen in love with him. Marina’s memory of that night was vague, as though the whole of it were somehow muted—the sound of the breeze across the yard, her mother’s summer dress, the smell of after-sun lotion. She remembered that her father had poured a whisky for himself, and then one for her, and that her mother had pretended to be scandalized. She remembered that they went to bed without cleaning up and that she had heard the two of them laugh that night, in their room, and then a bit later heard the sound of her mother going out to the bathroom, which was down the hall, and then closing the bedroom door. Then brief whispering. And later there’d been another foray into the bathroom by her father, or her mother. Next came a troubling silence, during which she knew with unquestionable certainty that they were getting undressed. She recalled that she stopped focusing on the book she was reading and “opened” her ears. The noises she heard sounded almost cruel, in a way, as though one of the two of them were deliberately hurting the other a little, then came a sort of cacophonous melody, somehow offbeat, and then suddenly, unmistakably sharp—like a freakish tropical bird, cawing in the middle of the night—her mother gasping, and a shrill little laugh.
The following morning, after she woke, she walked drowsily down the hall, and as she passed her parents’ door, she saw that it was ajar. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen them sleeping, but when she did, she nearly always felt a sort of awkward prudishness that made her look the other way or hurry past. That morning, too, she hurried past, went to the bathroom and then to the kitchen, but the smell of unwashed dishes and seafood from the night before made her so sick that she decided to go back to bed and read so her mother would be the one to clean it up. On her way back down the hall, she passed their slightly open door once more, and that time she stopped. She silently pushed it a little further open, trying not to make any noise, and instantly became flustered.
She wanted to see.
She wanted to blush.
She, too, wanted to do something cruel and intimate.
And to open that door, to stare shamelessly.
At first, she couldn’t really see anything. She had to stand there leaning against the doorjamb, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. It took a few minutes. She could hear them breathing, though. It was like a conversation between friends who are slightly irritated with one another, one responding kindly to the other’s outbursts; she heard her mother’s low whistle first and then, immediately after, her father’s emphatic snore.
She was gradually able to see them clearly.
They were deep in slumber, her father face down in his underwear, head under his pillow, her mother leaning toward her father, summer nightgown tangled between her legs. They looked ragged, amiable, exhausted, as though something had been tossing them around in the air all night, above the bed, and then just dropped them there in those positions. The air in the room was stale. It smelled of sleep. A tremor passed over them, moving through their bodies. They bore a physical resemblance, like siblings. Her mother had one hand under her pillow and the other reaching out to her father’s leg, as though she couldn’t sleep without touching him, without knowing he was still there. There was a rustling, something that seemed to come from the sound of their breathing itself, mysteriously syncopated. Her father lifted his head slightly and turned it toward her mother, lurching and turning onto his side, his knees leaning against her hip. Marina instantly feared that her father might wake up all of the sudden and catch her spying on them, but he settled once more and stopped moving. It was a dance, a slow and boundless dance, each of them so at the mercy of the other that everything around them seemed provisional. It was only her presence that made the things around them real—the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, the nightstand, yesterday’s clothes on the little armchair by the sideboard, the newspaper that her father had brought up to read in bed and then not read, the ashtray with the butt of the last cigarette her mother had smoked—from all of those things seeped a presence that was contained and concentrated in their bodies. Up until now, she’d assumed that it was for fear of seeing their nakedness, albeit accidentally, that she was embarrassed to watch her parents sleep, now she understood that what she was really afraid of, what she was ashamed of, was something else; it was as though something had altered their intimacy itself. She felt like she’d never truly seen them before.
She closed the door as slowly as she could, trying to make as little noise as possible, and not until she heard the little click that meant it was all the way shut did she realize how nervous she was. She thought it was astonishing that week in and week out, for more years than she’d been alive,
the striking scene she’d just witnessed was repeated daily. Something about that feeling reminded her vaguely of that Dylan Thomas quote, that letter he’d written his girlfriend, or wife, maybe, she didn’t know which. She sat on the chair in her room, looked out at the chestnut tree in all its splendor. It had rained a little in the night, and when she opened the window, a cool, fresh scent wafted in. She took out a few pieces of paper, sat down somewhat theatrically, and wrote as neatly as she could:
“You mustn’t look too grown up, because you’d look older than me; and you’ll never, I’ll never let you, grow wise, and I’ll never, you shall never let me, grow wise, and we’ll always be young and unwise together.”
SHOPPING
As she’s waiting for Nelly on the corner of the Plaza Colón, it begins to snow outside. An ill-defined flurry, tentative at first, then heavy for nearly five minutes, then tentative once more. Snow in Madrid. People get momentarily excited, despite the irritability brought on by Christmas shopping and the cold, and they suddenly act a bit childish. Snow always infantilizes people, she thinks. Snow always infantilizes, and Nelly always turns up late—ten minutes late, fifteen. Snow also has its own peculiar sound, like a plane flying overhead in the distance, and its own peculiar grace, the way it dissolves almost instantly on the sidewalk. The sky is blanketed in a bright, almost blinding white, as though the sunlight had thundered across the entire expanse of sky and filtered down in crystallized form, tiny glints ricocheting off Madrileños’ heads. Voices ring out, “Snow, snow,” in different pitches, almost all of them children’s. Voices, and a silent crackling, as though someone had imposed silence. Finally, she spots Nelly, flawless in a brown, three-quarter-length coat, on the other side of the Calle Serrano, hair pulled back and lips painted their customary fire-engine red. Why has she never called her Mamá? Perhaps, quite simply, because it’s impossible to call someone like Nelly Mamá, perhaps because she herself forbade it when she was a little girl. Don’t call me Mamá, call me by my name—call me Nelly. She can’t recall the conversation, but she’s sure it must have taken place. What’s this “Mamá” business? She remembers always having called her Nelly, remembers, distinctly, the astonishment of the other girls at school who called their mothers Mamá, and the sense—which has cemented over the years—of how inappropriate it was ever, at any point in her life, to have thought that Nelly could possibly be called anything but Nelly, even by the likes of her own daughter.
Nelly gives a curt wave to indicate that she’s seen her, then turns back to face the traffic on Serrano. It’s always the same with Nelly—everything takes place all around her, it’s as if she gave off a strange, dramatic perfume. She hasn’t seen her in nearly four months, since the funeral, and she looks prettier now, more at peace, maybe. Her beauty is a gift. There are millions of women who would kill to look like Nelly at fifty-six, and Nelly knows it, which is why she acts, at times, as though beauty were an inconsequential and somewhat silly concern; she communicates as much in each of her gestures, in the way she won’t turn her head toward her, keeps looking out at the traffic, as though the person she were on her way to meet were standing there and not on the other side of the street and she were observing them, unseen. Or as though something had somehow obstructed her train of thought and she’d turned her head away from the distraction. Suddenly she feels ashamed at not having put more effort into her appearance, dressed up more to go shopping with Nelly. Stepping out of the shower, she’d considered it, knowing that exactly this situation would arise, but in the end, she decided on a pair of jeans, boots, and a run-of-the-mill coat. It was a small act of vengeance. I’m not dressing up just for her, she thought and pulled on her jeans with a slightly absurd sense of triumph. She left home feeling attractive and gradually lost confidence as she made her way to the corner, where she arrived with none at all. As always, she sought to comfort herself, repeating over and over that it really didn’t matter, yet glancing at her reflection in storefront windows at every possible opportunity. What she saw there was a thirty-year-old with a mother’s figure, a slightly scruffy air, a face that was pretty but too full, boots that didn’t go with her jeans, and an unconvincing walk; every time she saw herself, she had the urge to say, That is not me. She feels it more now than ever, as the light turns red and Nelly heads toward her.
“It’s ridiculous, this snow,” she says, giving her a kiss. “Can you believe it?”
“I know.”
To hope that Nelly might apologize for being late would be asking too much, so she doesn’t. But she’s angry with herself and struggling to be pleasant. She’s thinking that they have to go Christmas shopping for her aunts and that it’s going to be a long day. A long day with Nelly.
“It’s always the same when it snows in Madrid, three measly flakes and everything is total chaos, that’s what I said to Rafael on my way out.”
Rafael is Nelly’s husband, a banker she met three years ago and only ever brings up as a phantom interlocutor when what she really wants is to repeat something she said earlier. “He’s the perfect husband,” she says, “hardly ever speaks.” They got married two years ago, and she remembers the wedding, remembers Nelly in the hotel room in Santander, putting on the finishing touches, remembers Papá’s phone calls (How’s everything going up north?), his faux-polite voice sounding strangely wounded (Does your mother look pretty?), Nelly’s swagger—How do I look? Are you impressed? She also remembers standing by Nelly’s side, suddenly sensing an abrupt distance, the smell of the flowers in her hair, a smell that seemed like it was from her childhood but wasn’t, Nelly’s implacable presence, the rain that began to splatter against the windows (Please tell me it’s not going to start raining right now) and then immediately stopped, giving way to a glorious day, full of just-washed freshness.
“So, what do you think, where should we start?”
“I don’t know, wherever you want.”
“What’s the matter? It’s like you’re not even here.”
“No, I’m fine, it’s just that I almost froze waiting for you out here.”
“Well, you should have waited in a café.”
There couldn’t have been a more Nelly reply, she thinks. She has a knack for repackaging things so that if anyone tries to reproach her, she turns the whole thing immediately, blisteringly on its head. The reproach, as ever, now rebounds onto her. Of course she could have waited in a café, that’s not the issue. The issue is, quite simply, that Nelly was late. And perhaps there’s another issue, too—the fact that she’s smiling against her will, that she can picture her smile as if she were standing at a mirror—wounded, ambiguous, manipulated by Nelly, a bit dim-witted, like the faint, dopey smile of her father, but without his good will, a smile that fails to strike a tone. I can’t rescue every broken-winged bird, Nelly likes to say. As well as, You’re impossible, kid, just like your father, I can never tell what either of you think of me.
“We could start with Aunt Mariana,” she finally says.
“Yes,” replies Nelly, “she’s the easiest.”
With Nelly, you never know if easy is a virtue or a character flaw. In any case, for her, it’s neither. She’s always considered natural behavior the most arduous and least natural battle a woman has to wage. Sometimes she even believes that acting natural is simply the most sophisticated of orthopedics, a vague cumulus of rehearsed expressions, expressions that eventually become reflexes by dint of repetition. Not so for Nelly. Nelly is natural like a typhoon is natural, like all true self-centered egotists, like a disaster, like the Grand Canyon, like a luxury item ensconced in an absurdly minimalist display case in a glittery shop window. That’s why she heads straight to Loewe, as though there were no need to explain the decision she’s come to in her head.
“Initials. Don’t let me forget, we have to tell them to monogram her initials.”
“On what?”
“A purse.”
“I didn’t k
now you could ask them to do that.”
“Of course you can. They should offer to do it in gold.”
They walk into the store, and Nelly immediately makes a face.
“I see the place has been remodeled,” she says, looking like she just got a stomach cramp.
“Yes,” the shop assistant replies solicitously, “we just unveiled the new space three weeks ago.”
“My sincere condolences.”
The salesclerk smiles. A startled-pigeon smile, quick and fake, as though someone had jabbed his cheeks with two fishhooks and quickly jerked them up. Against all odds, out of sheer nervousness, he responds, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
She might be the only one who has the right to laugh at Nelly’s sense of humor. That, in fact, might be the one thing that has truly filtered down into her own character. It’s an expression that seems to begin in the eyebrows, a vague and infinitesimal contracting of the brows that gradually spreads across her whole face, concealing it, like a clever boy who’s mischievously sadistic and takes full advantage of how innocent he looks. Humor, for Nelly, is a sign of authority. And detached intimacy—she can’t explain it any better than that, can’t conceive of it any better than that, like with so many other things about Nelly. She remembers many of her jokes, the way she says charming every time something horrifies her, the way she lifts her chin just slightly and opens her mouth, feigning surprise, and speaks to the person she’s joking with but without addressing them directly, as though humor had to be unusually oblique, a triple bank shot.